Christmas is my favorite time of year for sure. I love the anticipation of waiting, the decorations, the lights, and the music. Part of it probably has to do with the fact that my birthday is near Halloween. Then comes the planning for Thanksgiving and looking through recipes.
Our family traditionally tries to put our Christmas tree up the weekend of Thanksgiving and get the decorating done as well. Then we usually spend the whole month of December cooking, baking, and making our favorite foods and treats.
My brother's birthday is a few days after Christmas, so we extend our celebrating of the holidays a little longer, and then it is New Year's Eve and New Year's Day and another celebration. A few days later on January 4th is my sister Anna's birthday and so of course more celebrating. Finally, January 14th rolls around which is my mother's birthday, and my parent's anniversary as well.
Since we generally celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving, we are looking at about three whole months of nonstop fun in our family. Now we have added Bryanna and Mindy's (brother's wife) birthday's to October and Bryan's (Anna's husband) birthday to December we have even more reason to celebrate.
For Christmas, we were a little late and didn't get the tree up until Friday, December 6th. It looked really nice. I am traditionally a multi-color light person, and this time the tree had white lights and silver and blue ornaments. I was quite impressed with how it looked. I really liked it a lot. I may now alter the colors from year to year.
On Wednesday, December 17th we got SNOW in Las Vegas. It was steadily snowing outside all day. That night the school district canceled school for Thursday the first time ever. We had our family celebration on Friday, December 19th at our house. My brother's family came up from Henderson. Gifts were exchanged (we all name draw) with everyone, and we had a lot of fun seeing what everybody got.
We fixed some really yummy food and had a good time. On Saturday, December 20th, my brother's family came up again. Anna and Bryan had gone to Bryan's brother's house that night, so they weren't with us. We watched "A Christmas Story" and "Home Alone" which is a family tradition to watch those movies every year. We had some excellent leftover food from the night before and spent some time talking, and Mathew and Austin had tons of fun playing with toys.
Tuesday, December 23rd we had our friends over for another Lasagna Dinner. The food was superb as usual, and we had a surprise of Christmas presents for everyone! The kids were soo excited to open them. Mathew had a lot of fun playing Santa and helping to wrap everything up.
Our friend's brother came that night as well, and WOW was he soo shocked when we had presents for him too. They were all things which he loved as well including his favorites of Oreos and Dr. Pepper. He was quite stunned and speechless for a bit. I loved it.
We have decided to have an annual Lasagna Dinner every year before Christmas. It is a nice change from traditional holiday food and soo much fun to pull out the fancy dishes one more time.
Christmas day Bryan had to work so we got up around 7:00 a.m and started opening presents around 7:30 a.m. It was a little early for us since we have gotten used to letting Mathew sleep in until 8 or 9 a.m. before getting up. We had a lovely meal that we fixed that night (in time for Bryan to get home) and had a good time watching movies.
For New Year's Eve, we ate donuts, cocoa and apple cider which is a tradition in our house. Anna and Bryan went to a party. Mathew went to bed reasonably early and Dad, Sarah, and I stayed up until midnight. New Year's Day we all slept in and relaxed all day.
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